In Bangladesh's Power Vacuum, A Potent Political Mix Erupts

February 5, 2025, could have been a day for Bangladesh’s Muhammad Yunus government to highlight its achievements in six months since taking over from Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian rule. Instead, it turned out to be a day that exposed how Bangladesh faces the risk of descending into anarchy. 

The lawlessness of the government’s early days re-emerged, highlighting the Yunus government’s surrender before mobs bent on taking the law into their own hands in the name of revenge for Hasina’s Awami League (AL) party’s misdeeds.  

On February 5, news broke in the afternoon that Hasina, who has been in India since flying out of her country on August 5, would address Bangladesh’s students from the official Facebook page of her party’s student wing, the Chhatra League. The Yunus government recently banned the Chhatra League for its involvement in the July 2024 violence against anti-government protesters.

Soon, some online activists, including some based outside Bangladesh, called on anti-Hasina activists to pull down Mujibur Rahman’s residence at 32, Dhanmondi in the heart of Dhaka. 

Rahman, Hasina’s father and the main leader of Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War, lived in this house in the pre-Liberation War days and during his rule after Bangladesh’s independence, and was killed here along with other members of his family by some rogue army personnel in a coup in 1975. This building, preserved as a museum, was vandalised on August 5, 2024, within an hour of Hasina flying out. Now it was time to demolish it. 

On August 5, there was no government and the law-enforcing authorities had completely withdrawn, fearing reprisal for their bloody attempts to suppress the protests. Peace Nobel laureate economist Muhammad Yunus took charge of the new interim government as Chief Advisor on August 8. It took another few days for Yunus to have a panel of advisors (de facto ministers). 

Political observers had then mostly seen the August vandalism as an expression of public anger against Hasina, who used her father’s legacy to legitimise her rule tainted by widespread allegations of violation of human rights, often brutal suppression of opponents and critics and gross electoral malpractices.  

However, on February 5, 2025, a mob of a few hundred people, armed with bulldozers and hammers, demolished the building in a frenzy and in full view of a contingent of armed forces, television channels and social media ‘live’ videos for over 12 hours. 

The government responded with deafening silence. Worse, a key leader of the student agitation, Hasnat Abdullah, had indirectly called for the same when he, at 5.55 pm, wrote in a Facebook post: “Tonight, Bangladesh would be freed from fascism’s pilgrimage.” In their lingo, it was a reference to Mujib’s house. 

At 6.38 PM, Asif Mahmood Sajib Bhuiyan, another student leader who now serves as the youth and sports affairs advisor in the government, wrote on his social media page, “Let’s turn it into a festival.” The message was clear and loud.  

Action and Inaction 

The demolition started shortly after 7.30 pm on February 5. Among the first senior politicians to appeal for restraint was Shafiqur Rahman, the head of the Jamaat-e-Islami Bangladesh, which–incidentally–carries the legacy of opposing the Liberation War of 1971. He wrote on social media at 10.44 pm, asking people to show patience and restraint. 

The demolition drive was then in full swing. The Jamaat chief faced intense ‘trolling’ from the supporters of his own party, mostly the student wing activists. Within 40 minutes, he made another social media post, blaming Hasina’s late evening speech for everything. 

The first response from a government authority came six hours after the demolition started. At 1.54 AM on February 6, Mahfuz Alam, one of the key leaders of the student-led movement who now serves as the special advisor to Chief Advisor Yunus, made a feeble appeal. “Do you know how to build?” he asked and appealed to the public to focus on constructive changes. It had no impact on the vandalisation. 

The first response from Yunus came at 4 pm on February 6, when he blamed Hasina’s ‘provocative’ speech for the vandalism, ostensibly forgetful of the norm that protecting properties and enforcing laws are the government’s duty. Alam made a Facebook post at 11.53 pm on February 6, asking people to stop vandalism and let the government do its work. 

By that time, the government’s consent or compulsion–by whichever way one may look at their response–had become clear to those energised by the vandalism mission. The fire spread. 

Houses of senior Awami League leaders were attacked, bulldozed and set on fire in at least 35 districts. Dozens of other sculptures and murals of Mujibur Rahman bore the brunt. Bayatul Aman, a building in Narayanganj associated with the Bengali language movement of the early 1950s, was razed. An office of the Jatiyo Samajtantrik Dal party and Bangladesh Chhatra (student) Union in Bogura came under attack. A sculpture depicting a farmer in Sunamganj was demolished. 

Protesting against this chain of developments, 26 prominent members of the civil society issued a statement on February 7, saying that Mujib’s ‘historic residence’ was destroyed with complete knowledge of the law enforcement agencies. 

There was no scope for the government to avoid responsibilities, alleged the signatories, which included lawyer and human rights activist Sultana Kamal, academic and author Rasheda K Chowdhury, economist Anu Muhammad, social activist Khushi Kabir, academic and rights activist Parween Hasan, transparency activist Iftekharuzzaman and advocate Sara Hossain.  

On February 10 night, Alam posted a message on Facebook, threatening strong action against those creating mobs. However, after facing a severe backlash from Islamist activists and politicians, Alam posted another message 24 hours later, diluting the essence of his previous message.  

A Pattern 

These vandalisms and mob violence were not a period of exception. There are other signs of the rise of the Muslim fundamentalist forces that are bent on erasing things that they find un-Islamic, going by their own interpretation of Islam. 

In January 2025, the International Organisation of Sufism alleged that 80 shrines and darbars were attacked, damaged looted and set on fire in Bangladesh since August 5. Religiously motivated mobs have prevented a female actor from opening a showroom, stopped women’s football matches and prevented baul-fakiri music events from taking place. 

Baul-Fakiri music is indigenous to the Bengal Delta, which includes Bangladesh and India’s West Bengal state. The tradition, influenced by both Sufi Islam and Vishnavite Hinduism, preaches universal humanism and represents a syncretic culture peculiar to the Bengal Delta.  

On December 10, economist Anu Muhammad expressed concerns in a column that ‘in certain instances, it seems that the government does not exist in the country’. He wrote that such incidents were creating questions on an international level concerning the credibility of the present government. “In which direction is Bangladesh being led? There are assaults and attacks on baul songs, mazars (shrines) and sculptures. Who are the ones launching these attacks? What is the government doing to stop them?” Muhammad asked. 

Muhammad’s article echoed the concerns of many civil society members–many of them critics of Hasina’s rule–as what happened on February 5-8 was similar to what happened in August 2024 and thereafter. 

According to an August 21 report by Prothom Alo, one of Bangladesh’s leading dailies, about 1,500 sculptures, relief sculptures, murals and memorials were vandalized, set on fire and uprooted all over the country in just three days — August 5-7.

Those that fell to the vandals’ wrath included the 150-year-old, imported marble statue of the Roman goddess Venus and legendary artist Zainul Abedin’s statue at Shashi Lodge in Mymensingh district; the Lady of Justice statue on the Supreme Court premises that had long been an eyesore to Muslim fundamentalist forces; the nearly a hundred statues at the iconic Swadhinata Sangram Bhaskarjya Chatwor (Freedom Struggle Sculpture Square) on the Dhaka University campus; almost 500 sculptures at the Mujibnagar Liberation War Memorial Complex; and even a statue of 19th-century tribal heroes like Sidhu and Kanhu. 

No wonder, voices of concerns were getting louder in February 2025. On February 11, university teacher and columnist Zahed Ur Rahman said in an article that Hasina’s statements during her February 5 speech “certainly infuriated the people” but questioned if the anger was greater than that of 5 August, or even anywhere close to it. 

“Why did houses which were not attacked and destroyed at the peak of public fury after Sheikh Hasina’s fall, come under attack six months later when the anger was comparatively less?” he asked. He suspected conspiracies at different levels. “It is clear that certain opportunists are at work. We have no idea what steps the government is taking against them,” he wrote. 

Rahman held Bangladesh’s current internal circumstances more important than the challenges the country may face from foreign powers. “Vested quarters are encouraged to take up all sorts of misdeeds when a weak and ineffective government is at the helm. This is creating serious apprehensions regarding our state’s advancing towards democracy,” he wrote. 

Power Struggle 

To many of Bangladesh’s political observers, what’s stopping the Yunus government from acting against religiously motivated mobs is quite evident–its heavy dependence on Jamaat-e-Islami, the biggest Islamic political party in the country, as well as other Islamic parties and organisations. 

Besides, the complete absence of two parties that ruled Bangladesh last three decades–the AL and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP)–in the new government has created a vacuum that the forces driving the government have failed to fill. 

After the fall of Hasina, the BNP, which ruled the country between 1991-96 and 2001-06, emerged as the biggest claimant to power. Bangladesh’s politics has, since the late 1980s, been shaped by the AL-BNP bipolarity. It is the BNP that led most of the anti-Hasina movements since 2008. 

However, the student leadership that spearheaded the anti-Hasina protests wanted to keep both the BNP and the army from coming to power. They themselves have a nominal political organisation, centered mostly in some urban pockets, and not even a party of their own. Therefore, the student-backed Yunus government relies heavily on the support from the JeI, the second-largest party in the post-August scenario. The army chief has backed the government. 

On the other hand, long-term allies BNP and JeI have now turned rivals, with the BNP trying to project itself as a liberal democratic force. There is an anti-AL secular-liberal-left space that the BNP seemingly wants to capture and the students are finding it difficult to posit themselves somewhere between the BNP and the JeI. 

According to Sydney-based Bangladeshi scholar Mubashar Hasan, Bangladesh’s journey of the past six months has been of mix experiences. He held government initiatives to reverse the institutional nature of human rights violations by disengaging the police, paramilitary forces and the army from systematic extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances as “a big achievement.” 

He considers the setting up of the five-member inquiry commission into the incidents of enforced disappearances during Hasina’s 16-year rule as “a milestone.” He called the move to allow a journalistic team to visit the infamous torture cells “extraordinary.” He, though, pointed out the Yunus government’s failure to book key actors behind human rights violations during Hasina’s rule.

“However, the concerning issues include the government’s lack of control over law and order and the inability to establish full confidence among the business community,” Hasan tells Outlook. “Much more was to be done to get the confidence of the religious and ethnic minorities and to deter the advancement of religious far rights.” 

A twin development of February 12 is expected to give the government some relief from AL’s activities, as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)’s report indicted the Hasina government of ‘crimes against humanity.’ The publication, titled, Fact-Finding Report: Human Rights Violations and Abuses Related to the Protests of July and August 2024 in Bangladesh, gives telltale details of brutalities that the Hasina government resorted to in suppressing the student-led mass upsurge. 

Even if the government gets a breather from the AL, no relief from undemocratic religious forces comes into sight. On February 12, another baul-fakiri music event was cancelled following objections from Hefazat-e-Islam, a major religious organisation. 

“It’s not Hasina’s hell again, not yet,” said a Dhaka-based writer, unwilling to be named, “But we are afraid another set of devils is trying to replicate Hasina-style devilry.”